How to Be West Africa’s Master of Political Flip-Flopping
In 1972, Francis Terry McNamara, fresh out of the University of Washington with a master’s degree, received an appointment from the U.S. government.
On paper, landing a diplomatic posting right after graduation was a stroke of luck. But McNamara was far from thrilled. A native American, he disliked the assignment; worse still, the destination struck everyone he knew as deeply dangerous. Almost every acquaintance warned him: “Watch your back.”
That intimidating posting was to a country you will no longer find on modern maps: the Republic of Dahomey.
When people talk about Africa’s most notorious troublemaker, the name that usually comes up is the Gambia. The tiny nation is famous for its bluster, issuing threats to the Soviet Union and the United States alike, as if no power on Earth could rein it in. Even the Gambia, however, had one country it treated with wary respect: Benin.
In August 2012, Yahya Jammeh, the Gambia’s bombastic leader, made another wild threat. The world usually brushed off his outbursts as empty posturing. This time was different: Jammeh threatened to carry out an execution.
At an African Union summit, delegates condemned him and made it clear: follow through, and there would be consequences. Opposition supporters gathered outside the prison, with BBC reporters on hand to document the standoff. When the scheduled execution date arrived, Jammeh backed down and let the matter drop. He had blinked.
If the Gambia’s legendary bravado folded against Benin, Benin’s reputation spoke for itself. The Republic of Dahomey, Benin’s predecessor state, looms large in West African folklore.
Benin sits on the West African coast, covering 112,000 square kilometres. Its ancestor, the Kingdom of Dahomey, stood out among pre-colonial African states. Its warriors were ferocious, spending much of their time raiding neighbouring groups and parading captives to the coast for ritual sacrifice. For its military prowess, Dahomey earned the nickname “the Black Sparta.”
Portuguese traders arrived in 1472. They decried the kingdom’s brutal human sacrifices — not out of moral outrage, but because enslaved captives fetched a silver coin each on the export market. Dahomey shifted from killing prisoners locally to selling them overseas. For the next three centuries, it became a steady supplier of enslaved people to European traders, growing rich off the transatlantic slave trade.
When the slave trade collapsed, Dahomey’s profitable business dried up. Its warriors could overpower nearby African tribes, but they could not stand against French firearms. France conquered the Kingdom of Dahomey in 1899 and folded it into French West Africa as a colony.
This history explains Benin’s fractured national character. Broadly speaking, its southern coast bore early European influence, and most people there are Catholic. The central interior is more traditional, rooted in Vodoun. The far north has absorbed cultural and religious influences from North Africa. Three very different zones were stitched into one state.
Benin was like mixing three separate flavours of potato chips: each works on its own, but together they clash. Nearly all the chaotic twists of its modern politics stemmed from this patchwork national identity.
Why did Dahomey become Benin? Because its modern history was a nonstop political two-step. While many nations oscillated between two sides of the political spectrum, Dahomey lurched back and forth, shifting direction without making real progress.
After the Second World War, independence swept across Africa, and Dahomey joined the movement. Its path to self-rule was messy, not because France clung desperately to power. Dahomey held gold and oil reserves, yet France never invested in developing them. The population survived mostly on subsistence farming; its 1960 per capita GDP stood at just 93 U.S. dollars, a staggeringly low figure.
The real crisis after France granted internal autonomy in 1958 was a single, unresolvable fight: who would rule.
Elections rarely worked as intended here. Policy platforms and slogans counted for almost nothing. To compete for the presidency, a candidate first had to answer for their religion. Split along the country’s three religious and cultural blocs, three dominant figures emerged: Hubert Maga, Muslim; Justin Ahomadégbé-Tomêtin, Catholic; and Sourou-Migan Apithy, aligned with Vodoun communities. The three men waged a brutal electoral battle.
Ordinary election squabbles play out on television. Dahomey’s fights turned physical. Between 1958 and 1960, campaigning brought clashes between Christian factions, tear gas, archers, and standoffs between Vodoun priests and Catholic clergy. After two years of violent rivalry, Hubert Maga became Dahomey’s first president in 1960.
Maga inherited an empty treasury. He rolled out an economic plan with four pillars:
First, boost farming. He borrowed French money for fertiliser to raise crop yields. The idea sounded sensible, but local farmers misused the supplies. Some planted one seed alongside one grain of fertiliser, with no effect. Others dumped huge amounts on each seed, burning them outright. The extra harvest did not even cover the interest on the French loan.
Second, forced youth labour. Maga ordered minors to work for the state, seizing the fruits of their labour for free.
Third, expand taxation. The government taxed everything it could: businesses, permits, even childbirth. Female genital mutilation, a harmful traditional practice, was not banned. If a family paid the fee, the procedure was allowed. If they refused the procedure, they still paid a fine.
Fourth, cut public spending. Maga cut all state salaries by 10 percent. Unpopular as it was, it met relatively little pushback. Starting from an average income of 93 dollars, a drop to 82 dollars barely changed most people’s already desperate lives.
Maga’s policies were absurd, yet in Dahomey’s context, a plan of any sort was rare. Still, his priority was not national development. As president, his greatest personal ambition was a grand official residence.
After squeezing the country for funds, he hired a famous French architect to build a lavish presidential palace: marble doorways inlaid with gold, mosaic staircases, pebble-mosaic exterior walls, and a two-storey flag podium.
After years of misrule, the public and military had had enough. On 28 October 1963, soldiers overthrew Maga. His presidency lasted three years and 88 days — a record that would stand for many years.
Many African coups cleared the way for tyrants like Bokassa or Idi Amin. Nicéphore Soglo was different. He avoided installing a military junta and rejected civil war. After 89 days in charge, he handed power back to civilian leaders, and Ahomadégbé became president.
Ahomadégbé inherited the same broken state. Then Sourou-Migan Apithy took office, only to find the population too poor to tax further. He drafted a 200-page monopoly list, planning to auction exclusive rights to everything from coffins to school fees.
He proved no more popular. He was ousted by the military after just two days. That was not even the shortest term. Between 1960 and 1970, Dahomey cycled through 14 presidents. The shortest lasted only fourteen hours. Power rotated between the three established leaders, who prioritised graft, or weak figures who could not hold the presidency. For a decade, Dahomey’s politics cycled between farce and chaos.
By 1970, voters, soldiers and the three rival leaders were exhausted. The three men struck a bargain: a presidential council.
The presidency would rotate between the three of them, each serving two years, for a six-year cycle. While one held office, the other two promised not to sabotage the government. The international community watched in disbelief, but Dahomey’s elites were satisfied. Ordinary citizens were not. Previously, the three rivals had checked each other somewhat. Now protected by formal rules, they could extract resources from the state on a rotating schedule.
Under the new system, Maga took the first turn. He drained the treasury for two years before handing over to Apithy.
By 1972, Dahomey’s people were worn thin. Many would accept military rule, if only to end the chaos. That was the moment Francis Terry McNamara arrived in the country. He lived in constant fear; coups hung over Dahomey like a sword, and no one could predict when it would fall.
On 26 October 1972, McNamara drove back to the embassy after lunch and followed a military convoy without suspicion. The presidential palace sat right next to the U.S. embassy. He watched the convoy crash through the palace gates, soldiers storming the building with machine guns. A sustained burst of gunfire lasted two minutes. Shocked, McNamara sent an urgent report to Washington: “Heavy fighting, extremely bloody scene.”
Washington ordered him to gather more intelligence. Over the next few days, he learned the coup looked very different up close. The cabinet had been in session when the soldiers burst in. Every minister dived under the table. Despite the gunfire, no one was killed or wounded.
This coup differed from earlier ones. The military refused to hand power back to civilians. Instead, they backed a paratrooper commander: Mathieu Kérékou, later known as Africa’s most famous political chameleon.
Born in 1933 in a small northwestern Dahomey town, Kérékou came from a modest background. He excelled in school and trained at the French military academy in Fréjus. He admired French writers such as Hugo, Balzac and Maupassant, yet struggled with long-form writing. His solution was simple: he mastered short, pithy sayings. Whenever events unfolded, he produced a maxim. One of his lines: “The branch does not break beneath the chameleon’s grip.” Few understood its meaning, but Kérékou fancied himself Dahomey’s mini Hugo.
He returned home in 1960 and won favour with President Maga, who made him the presidential guard commander. When the 1963 coup unfolded, the presidential bodyguard Kérékou offered no resistance. He delivered one of his favourite lines: “Justice awaits everyone at the end.” His audience interpreted it as surrender.
He smoothly switched sides, winning promotion to command an engineer company and a mixed infantry company. The whole Dahomean military only numbered around 2,000 troops; he controlled roughly one-tenth of the armed forces.
He flipped sides repeatedly over the following years and rose to paratrooper commander and deputy chief of staff. People often wonder how Dahomey could support paratroopers. France left behind several aircraft capable of airborne operations, though the air force later lost the pilots needed to keep that capability alive.
Many historians argue that two junior officers launched the 1972 coup, only to realise they lacked the stature to govern. They needed a credible figure to lead, and settled on Kérékou. He took power almost by accident.
The coup took place on 26 October. Kérékou did not deliver his first public address until 30 October. He had no prepared governing agenda. In his speech, he denounced the old three leaders in a long litany of insults: monsters of Dahomey, inherently inefficient, notoriously corrupt, unforgivably incompetent. The list was so long it would have made Daenerys Targaryen proud.
After denouncing the old guard, he faced a central question: what came next? “We will build our own Dahomey,” he declared. He referenced Duvalier’s Haiti as a model, yet he had no clear blueprint for that distinct social order.
Kérékou’s most practical skill was manoeuvring between global powers. For small nations during the Cold War, this was a rare opportunity. Even states with little strategic value could court aid from the superpowers. Dahomey had scarce resources and no vital geographic position, yet Cold War rivalry made both the United States and the Soviet Union eager to win its allegiance. Kérékou negotiated with both, rejecting offers that did not suit him.
France’s actions tipped the balance. Its conduct stirred widespread anger, and many Dahomeans saw France and the U.S. as equally unappealing. In response, Kérékou made his choice. On 3 November 1974, he announced Dahomey would follow a Marxist path.
A devout Catholic once, he declared himself an atheist and broke with the church. He copied Soviet-style purges to remove opponents, though his methods were unusual. Where Stalin’s purges relied on espionage charges, Kérékou publicly accused his interior minister of an affair with his wife to justify removing him.
Open dissent vanished. Backed by Soviet support, Kérékou renamed the country the People’s Republic of Benin in 1975. The ancient Kingdom of Benin, however, sat inside modern Nigeria. That fact did not trouble him.
The Soviet Union offered meaningful backing. Brezhnev gave loans and technical advice, and laid out a clear path: join the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, grow cotton, and the USSR would buy every bale. He also suggested other options: textile mills, gold mining, cement plants. He warned against oil production, because the Soviet Union itself exported oil.
Kérékou wanted everything at once. He borrowed Soviet funds to launch an all-out industrial push: textile factories, cement plants, offshore oil infrastructure.
He ignored a fatal flaw: there were almost no skilled workers to operate the machinery. Benin’s education system was weak. Kérékou added his own sayings to school curricula, including “Poverty is not fate.” Inspirational slogans could not replace maths, science and technical training. The Soviet Union sent experts, but training the workforce proved nearly impossible. Cloth from the textile mills was thinner than toilet paper. Cement from the factories was too poor quality even for pigsties. Offshore drilling did not produce its first barrel of crude oil until 1982, just as global oil prices began to fall. Benin sold crude cheaply and bought refined petroleum at a premium.
Benin also imported all its electricity from Ghana, which charged exorbitant rates. Within years, the industrial experiment collapsed. Two-thirds of state-owned enterprises closed, but the economy kept shrinking. By 1985, foreign debt ballooned and GDP fell from 1.4 billion to 1 billion U.S. dollars. Kérékou stopped writing new maxims.
Desperate for cash, he turned to Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi. In the 1980s, he renounced atheism, converted to Islam, and adopted the name Ahmed Kérékou — his third major religious shift, from Catholicism to atheism to Islam.
Gaddafi’s resources were limited, however. In 1985, Kérékou struck a grim deal with the Soviet Union: Benin would accept Soviet nuclear waste for payment. Gorbachev agreed, and shipments arrived. Benin had no waste-treatment technology; workers simply dug pits and buried it.
France, Britain and the United States soon learned of the scheme. They also sent nuclear waste to be buried in Benin, making Benin a dumping ground for four of the five permanent UN Security Council members.
The millions earned from waste disposal were trivial against the national deficit. By 1986, the economy crashed. The Soviet Union itself was struggling, and Benin could no longer pay public salaries. Teachers, civil servants, soldiers and clergy all went unpaid. Every social group united against him. Two coup attempts shook the state in 1988; Kérékou survived only by force.
By 1989, he sensed the Soviet bloc was unraveling. He switched course again. At the end of the year, he abandoned Marxism as state ideology and renounced Islam, returning to Catholicism.
His reputation as Africa’s chameleon was sealed. This dramatic reversal did not save his presidency, but it saved him from political ruin. He lost the 1990 election, yet faced no persecution. The governments that followed failed to fix the economy.
In 1996, Kérékou staged a comeback and won the presidency again. He left office in 2006, with his final famous maxim: “If you do not leave power, power will leave you.”
He died in 2015 at age 82, and Benin held a national day of mourning with a state funeral.
Many wonder why a leader with such a turbulent record received such honours. Judged as a statesman, Kérékou’s economic record was a failure. Judged as a person, he stood apart from most African strongmen. He did not steal public funds, hoard wealth, or build lavish palaces for himself. He tried to improve his country, even if his attempts were clumsy. His constant ideological and religious shifts were just survival tactics for a fragile state. In Africa, a leader who tries in good faith and stays honest is rare enough to earn respect.
Benin’s story is representative of many small nations. It has tried civilian rule, military rule, socialist ideology, farming and industrialisation. It has seen corrupt leaders and honest ones. Yet it never found a reliable development path. Looking back, Kérékou’s rush to industrialise seems foolish. But if he had followed Brezhnev’s cotton plan, Benin would have become Africa’s Cuba, dependent on a single export. The pain would have arrived later, not gone away.
Benin’s experience is the quiet story of most small countries. They may escape war and natural disaster, yet remain trapped in stagnation. There is no ready-made script for national growth. Prosperity and stability are luxuries, and those who live with them rarely notice.
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